Due Date – Please submit your first draft of the research paper by 04/15/19 at 11:00am. Your second draft will be due on 05/10. Your final draft is due on 5/22 at 10:00AM.

Submission Guidelines – Please email your completed assignment as a Microsoft Word .docx file to me. My address is [email protected].

Revision Policy – This assignment can be revised and resubmitted for an entirely new grade. Revisions must be submitted by 05/10/19. Revising and resubmitting your paper is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. The final date to submit your paper will be announced shortly.

Assignment Prompt –

This entire semester we have been exploring the many ways in which writing is central to doing research. Writing the research proposal was an exercise in defining the scope and methods of the research project. Writing the annotated bibliographies allowed for a sharper overview of the existing scholarly research and also provided an opportunity to find sources from which the research paper can draw evidence.

Now we enter the next phase of the research cycle: composing the research paper. Your final paper should be 8-10 pages long, double spaced. You should write about the topic in your research proposal, and you should use 4-7 scholarly sources in your analysis. Make sure you format your paper according to the MLA standard (8th edition).

The point of the research paper is to present a reasoned, evidenced, and coherent argument on a topic of your own choosing. Because writing is a creative process and this class is housed within the disciplinary context of research in English, feel free to use your imagination to provide a narration of why you chose your particular topic, how the research process has challenged your earlier assumptions, and what further questions remain for you. Using the first-person or “I” is allowed and encouraged.

Tips for Success –

• If you are unsure of ways of incorporating the scholarly sources that you have found into your paper, please take a look at chapter 5 “Listening to Sources, Talking to Sources” in the Writing in College textbook that we read in our seminar. In this chapter you’ll find a number of ways of initiating a conversation with the scholarship that you’ve uncovered. You could summarize a number of findings to outline a the commonly-held point of view, you could compare and contrast multiple perspectives to describe points of disagreement, you could even refer to the previous scholarship to provide a sharper sense of the historical and cultural context and significance of your work. Please read this chapter to get some inspiration on ways of incorporating sources.
• If you are having some difficulty with organizing and structuring your ideas, look at the structure of Laurent Dubois’s chapter “Specters of St. Domingue” or Dillon and Drexler’s chapter “Haiti and the Early United States, Entwined.” These chapters provide different models of writing research and arranging ideas, which you can emulate and adapt to express your own ideas. Dubois takes a storytelling approach that sequences descriptions of character, plot, and setting to make an argument about the centrality of Haitian history to Western history. Dillon and Drexler make a similar argument but use a completely different approach. Rather than telling a story, they outline a scholarly conversation on the historical-political significance of Haiti that uses direct quotations, summaries, and paraphrase to support their claims.
  More help on organization can also be found in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of Writing in College.
• Proper citation is essential to getting a high grade in this assignment. Make sure your in-text citations and your works cited section are spot on. Further information on correctly using MLA standards can be found on the Purdue OWL website. Please take a look at their sample paper to see how your final paper should look.
• If you are having trouble with finding sources, please visit the reference librarian. This is an invaluable resource not only because you will walk away with sources that are germane to your project, but also  because having the opportunity to talk about your research topic will help you clarify your own arguments and questions.
• Please contact me and come to my office hours to discuss any questions or difficulties you are facing.

Learning Goals –

Students will learn how to:

• Express ideas by writing correctly, cogently, persuasively, and in conformity with the conventions of the discipline.
• Conduct individual research.
• Use library resources.
• Evaluate the credibility and value of different kinds of sources.
• Read and think critically.

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